Yesterday I met with our senior designer, our lead developer, and our product manager to discuss the design and functionality of a feature we plan to build out later this quarter. Our current sprint has barely started and already we are talking about what we plan to work on in the coming weeks and months. … Continue reading Already planning next sprint
In my current firm we’ve been working with Agile for over six years. Our process has evolved as has our understanding of Agile methodologies. We started with six-week sprints, shortened them to two weeks, and are now talking about a move first to one-week sprints and then perhaps to continuous deployment (not to be confused… Continue reading A sprint in the life: Begin with the end in mind
In my past two blog posts I have mentioned the Agile Manifesto and my intention to share some reflections on this important statement of the values behind an Agile development methodology. As I hone my plans for the next mini-arc of blog posts I want to write – about ‘a scrum in the life’ of… Continue reading Reflections on the Agile Manifesto
Any of you who grew up in the Eighties or who enjoy pop culture references from that era will remember Marty McFly. A slightly dorky teenager who is friends with a zany scientist named Doc, Marty gets sent back to 1955 in a DeLorean time machine where he interacts with his future parents. The trilogy… Continue reading Time travel the Agile way
With a few weeks of being sick and busy, traveling and celebrating, and wrapping up my last blog arc, it has taken me awhile to settle on the next set of topics I want to write about here. The way my mind works, I’m not as good at random musings as I am at more… Continue reading Introducing Agility
We’ve come at last to number ten on my top ten list of the core responsibilities of effective product owners in an Agile software development environment. In this set of posts I have talked about the image of product owners as bridges connecting the intelligence of the market with the resources of technology to create… Continue reading Know your product intimately
In my last blog post I wrote about how the product owner facilitates good decision-making when the team faces the need to make tradeoffs. This time I want to talk about another challenging responsibility for strong product owners: protecting the development team from unhelpful distractions. Anyone who has been reading this blog knows that perhaps… Continue reading Protect the team
For the past seven weeks or so I have been sharing my top ten list of the core responsibilities of effective product owners in an Agile software development environment. I started by discussing the crucial need for communicating with the product manager, because when the roles of product owner and product manager are split this can… Continue reading Handling tradeoffs
If you read books, websites, or tweets about product development (hopefully you’re at least reading my tweets from @asbiv and you must be reading this blog or you wouldn’t be reading these words now) then you’ve probably heard a lot about the roles of product managers and product owners. Much of the literature out there… Continue reading Be available
With my last post here I passed the half-way mark in my ‘top ten’ responsibilities of product owners. Here I want to talk about number six on this list: good product owners talk with the designer, lead coder, and lead tester about what’s coming up in future sprints. In the movie When Harry Met Sally,… Continue reading Planning what’s next
InTruthItsNotThatSimple 